We’re skeet shooting
the potter’s seconds.
The catapult slings
skewed plates, cracked
vases in erratic arcs
across the dry creek canyon.

Each Thursday evening
we obliterate
the week’s mistakes.
When the pellet-spread connects,
explodes a shrapnel star
it’s an absolution.

Lucinda’s been casting
reproductions of Egyptian
bowls with tiny feet.
One seems near perfect;
but when I set it
on the trap-box edge
it lists, daylight gleaming
beneath the toes of one foot.

When wet and forming
it must have rested
on a warp, something
not quite level in the firing.

It seems somehow unfair
this small, lame thing
wound up in the slag-box
destined for buckshot
just because it totters.

And it strikes me
how much easier it is
to love a flawed object –
the supplicant’s posture
like a pair of cupped hands;
the sloped bowl tilted in offering;
its little feet of clay.


Caron Andregg is co-editor of the fine journal Cider Press Review, which is accepting submissions through Aug. 31. They also sponsor a poetry manuscript prize open for entries Sept. 1 (deadline Nov. 30). This poem was originally published in Rattle.